Car Supremacy: No Different from White Supremacy and Class Domination

A comrade was struck on Esplanade Ave & Treme by a maroon Chrysler Pacifica. An elderly white man weaponized his vehicle against a woman on a bicycle. (There were witnesses, and the license plate has been documented and submitted to law enforcement). After assaulting her with his SUV, the driver mocked her right to the road, reducing her humanity to an inconvenience. In shock, she told him, “You hit me with your car.” He responded by mocking her and telling her, “It’s not a car, it’s an SUV.”

This is not an isolated act of individual aggression—it is the logic of car supremacy, inseparable from the broader hierarchies of white supremacy and class domination. Just as capital privileges property over people, some motorists privilege speed and convenience over human life. Our lives are subordinated to the reign of machines that dominate public space, subsidized and sanctified by the state, while those who dare to move differently—on foot or on bike—are criminalized, marginalized, or, as in this case, violently assaulted.

When the Esplanade bike lane was stripped, officials claimed the street was “too narrow” between the River and Claiborne to protect cyclists. In reality, this is the very terrain where protection is most urgent. Streets narrowed by history are widened by violence when drivers insist their right to dominate supersedes our right to exist.

Car supremacy is not simply a cultural attitude—it is an infrastructure of oppression. It declares that our bodies, our communities, our futures, are disposable in the name of speed and fossil fuel consumption. We reject this! We demand justice for our comrade, and we demand a city that values life over oil profit, protection over convenience!

Our fight is not just for bike lanes—it is for liberation from the tyranny of the automobile, a system that mirrors the same supremacies we confront in every other sphere of struggle.